Intel Atom Z3530

The Intel Atom Z3530 is a power efficient quad-core SoC for (mainly) Android tablets and smartphones. It is clocked at up to 1.33 GHz (Burst) and part of the Moorefield platform. Thanks to the specially optimized 22 nanometer low-power process (P1271) with tri-gate transistors, performance and energy efficiency have been significantly improved compared to its predecessor. Besides the CPU cores, the SoC integrates a PowerVR G6430 GPU as well as a Dual-Channel LPDDR3-1600 memory controller (max. 4 GB, 12.8 GB/s).

Architecture

The processor cores are based on the new Silvermont architecture, which is an out-of-order design for the first time. The increased utilization of the pipeline and many other improvements (optimized branch prediction, increased buffers, enhanced decoders) have increased the performance per clock by about 50 percent. At the same time, however, the Hyper-Threading feature of the previous Intel Atom generation has been removed. Other major changes are the support for new instruction set extensions such as SSE 4.1 and 4.2 as well as AES-NI (depending on the model).

Performance

Compared to other smartphone and tablet SoCs, the Z3530 offers a relatively high performance per clock. In some cases, the chip should even beat significantly higher clocked chips like the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600. Consequently, the Z3530 can be classified into the upper mid-range of mobile SoCs (as of mid-2014).

Graphics

The integrated GPU has not been developed by Intel itself, but licensed from Imagination Technologies. The PowerVR G6430 can also be found in Apple's A7, but here it is clocked somewhat higher at 457 MHz. Compared to other mobile graphics solutions, the G6430 performs similar to or better than the Snapdragon 800/Adreno 330 or the ARM Mali-T628 MP6. Therefore, even the most demanding Android games of 2014 will run fluently in high resolutions.

Power Consumption

According to its performance and specifications, the chip should have a medium power consumption. Intel claims, the SoC is suitable for tablets as well as smartphones.